The Uprooted Kitchen

Contract caterer, Holroyd Howe, brings experiential street food concept to schools to inspire and educate pupils

Posted by Stephanie Broad | June 25, 2015 | Catering & hospitality

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Holroyd Howe has extended the educational side of its catering provision with the launch of its street food concept, Uprooted Kitchen. A mobile team of development chefs roaming all client schools across the country, the Uprooted Kitchen offers demonstrations on international street food including Thai, Mexican and Vietnamese. This is in addition to their existing butchery, sushi-making, pasta-making and juicing demonstrations. 

An interactive food stand, the Uprooted Kitchen takes position in the corner of a school’s dining hall, where pupils can choose to come and watch, taste the food and learn how to make it themselves. The chefs are often also accompanied by local producers or farmers, who will demonstrate how to make sausages or fillet fish. 

Following on from the success of the food demonstrations Holroyd Howe has been running for a number of years, the Uprooted Kitchen offers more frequent, and a wider range of, demonstrations for schools. In time, this will also lead to offering Uprooted Kitchen options as alternatives to the core school meals at lunchtime, and pupils will be able to choose street food or fresh sushi as their main meal instead. 

Company Executive Chef, Damian Blake, who leads the Uprooted Kitchen and the Holroyd Howe Development Team comments: “Feeding pupils delicious, exciting food is obviously of utmost importance to us, but being able to also show them how to make it themselves is extremely rewarding. This interactive demonstration style seems to be increasingly popular with TV chefs and their audiences, and we’ve found pupils of all ages love to interact with food in this way. It’s also a great way for us to expand their knowledge of food and cookery.” 

Schools including St Paul’s School and Notre Dame in Cobham have so far experienced the Uprooted Kitchen. Many have chosen to include this type of food demonstration during lessons too, seeing food education as increasingly integral to the overall education of school pupils.

David Plummer, Principal of Notre Dame School, Cobham says: “The Uprooted Kitchen is a fantastic concept. The pupils really benefit from this type of lunchtime interaction with our chefs, and their peers. These are exactly the sort of long-term life-skills that go hand-in-hand with an all-round education in the independent school sector.”

www.holroydhowe.co.uk